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Paper short abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate literary and cinematic elasticity of definitions of vague terrain as spatial metaphor of the uncanny behaviour of fragile humans, the ones suppressed on the margins of the known world.

Paper long abstract

Asylums, monasteries and mysterious places in literary and cinematic narratives, are territories where limits of sanity of the “dangerous” or “monstrous” individual is being measured beyond mere medical diagnosis. The zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), or the asylum in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (1967), or Elena Doriak’s monastery in Losev’s Meteor (1930s), are structures between urban life and untamed nature. The characters and their unusually site-sensitive relationship with these places, transform the “illness” into an intensified form of awareness, radically questioning the socially accepted order of behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to investigate literary and cinematic elasticity of definitions of vague terrain as spatial metaphor of the uncanny behaviour of fragile humans, the ones suppressed on the margins of the known world.

The article offers a review of case studies that explore peripheral territories as metaphorical devices of exclusion and petrification of the other, the different, the uncanny, the monstrous.

Alongside the relationship between the fragile (strange) humans and places, the review will offer a comparative analysis of the relationship between mythological creatures (Nabokov’s dragon, Tolstoy’s storyteller horse, Bulgakov’s Margarita) with the environment, opening the concepts of “health” and “illness”, “angelic” and “monstrous” to a more complex discussion.

Our paper is offering transdisciplinary examples on narrated stories by marginalised, vulnerable creatures in a “no man’s land”. Within the works under analysis, the vague terrain is often perceived as the margin of the known world, where society imprisons someone that is difficult to be placed in a clear category.